Why Did the Founders Create a Divided Congress?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns the need to adhere to constitutional principles. The further America moves away from the U.S. Constitution, the more freedom is lost. In an interview with Virginia Allen of The Heritage Foundation, Joseph Postell, an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College, discussed Congress and its history. 

Allen asked a question about the design for government created by the Founders of America. The question is, “Now, when the Founders were crafting Congress, why did they see a need for two separate entities, to have a House and a Senate?” Postell gave the following as a short answer: “But I think the question you’re asking really gets at the most significant thing about Congress…. So they actually deliberately made Congress weak by dividing it up into these two bodies.” The professor continued with his explanation, which Allen said, “invites a very different answer.” Then she explained her opinion as follows.

First, there is the significance of the word “Congress.” Here is the first definition of that word in my dictionary: “A formal assembly of representatives, as of various nations, to discuss problems.” The Congress of Vienna is a famous example. It was a series of meetings between representatives of the nations of Europe to try to work out a new European political order after the defeat of Napoleon. It was not called the Parliament of Vienna because it was not a legislative body but an assembly of representatives.

And neither was America’s Continental Congress. As Postell notes, the Continental Congress predated the Constitution. Representatives of the 13 former colonies met to work out how they could win their independence from the British Empire. It is often said that the Continental Congress was politically weak. All that really means is that it was not a legislative body. The states retained their sovereignty, and the representatives of the states met together to discuss the challenges the states needed to face together.

Why, then, did the Founders keep that name for the American legislature created by the Constitution? After all, it was no longer a formal assembly of representatives of the various states to discuss the problems they had in common.

Keeping the name made sense because the first Congress under the Constitution was in many ways more like the Continental Congress than the Congress of the bloated post-constitutional central government we have in Washington, D.C., today….

So, why did the Founders use the word Congress rather than Parliament? Because they delegated few and defined powers to the federal government and left all other powers to the States. The powers delegated to the federal government are “exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce.” The Founders reserved all other powers to the States. This is the principle upon which the current Supreme Court sent the matter of abortion back to the States.

Allen quoted Postell as giving a “very astute discussion of why the Founders kept the name is right on target.”

So unlike, say, Parliament, which was the ide of a legislative body with which the Framers were familiar, Congress implies something more like a bunch of different countries or different groups of people coming together to hash out their differences…

They use this word Congress because they really believed in a federal system. They really believed that they were states that were united for limited purposes, but a lot of the power and the sovereignty was going to lie back with the states.

So under this conception, really, it’s not an entirely national system. It’s actually a federal system in which the Congress is almost like diplomatic representatives from different countries coming together to kind of deal with issues like trade and military defense and things like that.

Under the U.S. Constitution, States send people to Congress to represent the interest of those States and their residents. The States gave up power to wage war or to negotiate with foreign nations. However, they also kept control of those powers through the representatives that they sent to Congress. Allen explained the situation as follows:

Besides, the state governments would not be giving up control of those powers. They would retain control of them by means of the Senate. According to the founding bargain, senators would be chosen by the state legislatures, and the Senate would control those powers delegated to the federal government. That’s why the Constitution gives the Senate power over treaties, over the declaration of war, even over the people the president selects for his Cabinet. By giving the state governments control of the Senate, the Constitution gave them enormous power within the federal government.

Consequently, Congress needed two houses, not to make it weaker, but for the simplest of reasons: the Founders’ astonishing innovation required it.

The American state governments were to be represented in the Senate – the federal legislative house of the state governments – and you and the people in your locality were to be represented in the House of Representatives – the federal legislative house of the people. The states and the people would each have a representative body in the federal legislature.

But in 1913, the American people broke the founding bargain, setting in motion the ongoing process of progressively overthrowing the Constitution, which is the source of the mess we find ourselves in today.

The 17^th Amendment was the single change that did the most to undo what the Founders had accomplished by means of the Constitution. It provided for the direct election of senators, the system we have now. The state governments would no longer control the Senate through the representatives they chose. The state governments’ base of political power within the federal government was taken from them, putting an end to the federal system of the Founders.

Allen continued by explaining that Progressives “tricked” the American people into believing that the Constitution needed to be reformed. “The ‘reform’ in effect repealed the 10^th Amendment: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’”

If the American voters had understood that the “reform” acted to repeal the 10^th Amendment, they most likely would not have voted for the change. “But by means of the 17^th Amendment, the Progressives accomplished something even more far-reaching: They removed the central pillar of the Founders’ brilliantly designed federal system.” With the 17^th Amendment, Americans lost freedoms. The loss of those freedoms brought us to the situation in which we live today. Progressives continue to work to change the Constitution.

Today, the U.S. Constitution “hangs by a thread” as prophesied by the Prophet Joseph Smith. The 2024 presidential election is our last chance to save the Constitution. If Biden is re-elected – or another Democrat is elected, we will lose our nation as we know it. Anyone and everyone who is interested in saving America and the U.S. Constitution should vote for Donald Trump!